Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

She was reasonably sure he wasn’t going to find the door he searched for. What she wasn’t at all sure of was what she could do to keep him trapped here until all his energy, his very essence, was drained away or pulled apart and he was no longer a threat.

She had the icy feeling that even if she did manage to find a way to hold him here for a while, her own energy would be drained a long time before his was.

She didn’t know what to do. What she could do. And she was so tired.

And alone.

The thought had barely surfaced in her mind when she felt the grip of Quentin’s hand on hers, so strongly that she looked at her hand fully expecting to see his. It wasn’t there. Of course. But, faintly…

Hold on, Diana, Don’t leave me .

“I’m trying not to,” she whispered.

“They took her off the ventilator a couple of hours ago,” Quentin told Hollis and DeMarco. “She’s breathing on her own.”

“That’s a good thing,” Hollis said.

“Yeah. But she didn’t respond when they tried to make her. Stimulus, they called it. Pain. She didn’t respond to pain.”

“We’ll get her back, Quentin,” Hollis told him.

Quentin looked like hell, his face haggard and eyes dark and shadowed with exhaustion, but he was at least clean and shaved due to one very determined nurse.

“She said I couldn’t stink up the ICU,” he told them with a tinge of his normal humor. “She wouldn’t have it on her shift. I said I wasn’t letting go of Diana and she said fine, she had experience with sponge baths.” He paused, adding, “Damned if she didn’t give me one. Which is very disconcerting when you aren’t, you know, a patient.”

“Or probably when you are,” DeMarco murmured.

Hollis had to agree with him, but what she said aloud was, “Did you eat anything?”

“Drank some soup.” He paused, added, “That’s one very determined nurse. Sophie. I asked and she said to call her Sophie.”

“Well, I’m glad she took care of you.” Hollis exchanged a glance with DeMarco, then said, “I tried something earlier, when you were asleep. Maybe it helped a little, I don’t know, but we think it might work better this time.”

Quentin frowned. “What did you try?”

“To help her heal.”

“Since when can you do that?”

“I don’t know that I can. But I can heal myself. And Bonnie is a medium who can heal others.” Bonnie was Miranda’s sister. “So I figured it was worth a shot.”

DeMarco said, “We think I got in the way before. So Hollis wasn’t able to reach Diana, at least not completely.”

“But I felt something,” Hollis told Quentin. “Even with Reese’s shield sort of blocking me, I felt something. I want to try again.”

After a moment, Quentin said, “That might not be too smart, Hollis.”

She didn’t have to be a telepath to know what he meant. “Look, I know Bishop and Miranda have been worried about me. All these shiny new abilities I keep… growing.”

“It’s a legitimate concern,” Quentin said slowly. “And if you’re trying to heal others now, that’s another whole new ability, coming awfully fast on the heels of the last one. Maybe too fast. You can push yourself too hard, demand too much of your senses. Your body. Your brain. It could be dangerous.”

“With these extra senses of ours, that’s a danger we all face, all the time. But it’s no reason not to try, if there’s a chance it could help Diana. I want to do this, Quentin.”

Quentin looked at DeMarco, who shrugged. “She’s determined,” he said. “I don’t think either one of us is going to talk her out of it.”

“You’ll anchor her?”

“Definitely.” DeMarco lifted one hand, showing Quentin that his and Hollis’s fingers were already laced together. “And, like you, I won’t let go. I may even be able to help, to … boost her signal, so to speak.”

Quentin was still frowning. “I’m tired, and I know I’m not thinking clearly. But one thing I do know is that Bonnie can’t walk in the gray time, and to my knowledge she’s never tried to heal anyone who could. Hollis, this situation… It’s unique. I mean, you may or may not be able to heal, or help heal, Diana’s body. But if her spirit is in the gray time, if she’s left that door open only a little, then you could be drawn in there. And with your own energies focused on healing, especially if those energies are intensified by Reese’s … I don’t know what might happen.”

“Neither do I.” She smiled wryly. “So let’s just do the thing and find out, okay?”

He looked at Diana’s still face, then returned his gaze to Hollis and said simply, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” She kept it light. “I may do nothing more than short out one of these machines or something.”

“Sophie will have a fit,” he responded, obviously making an effort.

“I’ll worry about that later too.” She smiled at him, then looked at DeMarco. “Remember, don’t block me. It took a while for you to retract that shield of yours so the world looks normal to me again, and I much prefer normal.”

Quentin said, “What’re you talking about?”

“It’s not important right now,” Hollis replied. “Listen, I have no idea if it’s even possible, but the three of us were all at Samuel’s Compound that last day, exposed to the weird energies there, and we were all sort of… connected. Maybe that can help us now. Maybe we can connect and build on one another’s abilities, like we did then.”

“I have no idea how that worked,” Quentin confessed. “Bishop was sort of the linchpin, maybe because he was the strongest telepath.”

“Then I nominate Reese to be our linchpin.”

“Thanks a bunch,” DeMarco said. “Appreciate the honor, but I don’t have a clue how to do it.”

Hollis didn’t allow that to slow the proceedings, because she was pretty sure that if Reese, at least, knew what she had very carefully not been thinking about during the last hour or so, he was liable to throw a protective wrench into the works. “Just everybody close your eyes and concentrate on focusing a bright, healing white light on Diana. I’ll do the rest. I hope.”

Before either of the men could voice another protest, Hollis closed her own eyes, drew a deep breath, and placed her free hand across Diana’s forehead. It wasn’t where her injuries were—physically, at least—but Hollis was playing another hunch, this one that she might be able to do two things: help heal Diana’s body and help her find her way back to it.

Before Reese or Quentin could stop her.

She concentrated on doing the two very different things, aiming her own energy in a healing blast of white light even as she reached deeper, attempting to find a door she wasn’t even sure she would recognize if she fell through it.

She felt the hot pulse of her energy rising, felt it flowing down her arm and through her hand into Diana’s body. And she knew, with a sense of excitement and satisfaction, that it was working.

She was healing Diana. She was—

She was falling. And landed with a mental, if not physical, thud.

Ouch?

“Hollis. Dammit, you shouldn’t be here.”

Hollis opened her eyes and stared—for a moment dizzily—at Diana, as she sat on a bench in a really cold and creepy gray-time representation of Serenade’s Main Street. She had forgotten just how weird and otherworldly the place—time—was, even with her own mini-gray-time experiences of the last twelve hours or so.

Not a place where one wanted to linger, oh, no.

“Hello to you too,” she said. And then, cautiously, “Diana, you do know what’s happened, right?”

“I was shot. Did I die?”